Of all the prospective front-runners in the Democratic primary, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren seemed to have the most obvious weaknesses for a general election against President Trump.
She lacked the straightforward electability argument of Joe Biden’s proudly moderate candidacy. And unlike fellow left-winger Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, she doesn’t have working class appeal. Warren has failed to attract black voters, perhaps the single most pivotal constituency of the Democratic electorate.
Meanwhile, Trump’s fundraising apparatuses have accrued more than $736 million, a record-breaking amount at this point in a presidential campaign. On paper, Trump should beat Warren in a landslide. Amid the longest bull market in history, with the lowest unemployment in half a century, Trump’s oddly unchanging approval rating has now met that of Barack Obama at this point in his presidential term. Despite all the chaos of collusion charges, Twitter tirades, and relentless unforced errors, a substantial number feel good about the direction of the country — a much larger number than when Obama left office.
Challenge a personally unpalatable president with the safety of Uncle Joe or some other centrist and Trump would have a real fight on his hands. Choose Warren, a scolding socialist seeking to nationalize the entire healthcare industry and chase millionaires out of the country with punitive taxation, and the case for our bad but not apocalyptic status quo seems obvious enough, yes?
Well, maybe not. The mounting evidence that Trump initiated a potentially impeachable quid pro quo to get a foreign government to dig up dirt on Democrats is not the key factor that makes me feel otherwise. Rather, it’s the resurgence of Hillary Clinton from the woods of Chappaqua, New York, that reminds me how hard 2020 will be for Trump.
For the second time in as many years, Clinton has claimed, without evidence, that an American politician — this one a war veteran, mind you — is willfully doing the bidding of the Russian government. By definition, that would be treason, and the punishment for treason (as Bill Well reminded us) is death.
As the Daily Beast’s Betsy Woodruff Swan noted over the weekend, Clinton deploying this charge twice now constitutes a conspiracy theory, and this time around, yet a further reminder of Clinton’s unique awfulness, a sheer level of deplorable that not one candidate in the primary even comes close to.
California Sen. Kamala Harris is a cop, Beto O’Rourke an insufferable trust fund baby, Sanders a geriatric socialist, Warren a more sprightly one, Biden nearly senile. The list goes on. But has any one of these candidate created more excuses for their own failures as shamelessly as Clinton? Has any one of them demonstrated the utter lack of self-awareness that half a lifetime spent protected by professional sycophants brings? And has any one of them committed or been complicit in the crimes against women that Clinton enabled?
This is where Trump should be worried. He barely beat Clinton in 2016, and his chances of drawing an opponent as awful as she is are nil.
Sure, Warren likely embellished her work history and outright lied about her ethnicity. But that’s the normal corruption we’ve come to expect from politicians. Did she attempt to shut down an investigation into her sexual predator producer pal? Did she sleep or marry her way to power? Does she accuse every bad thing that’s every happened in her life on someone else? Nope — sorry, that’s all Clinton.
The bar is on the floor, and she clears it. And Clinton’s reemergence serves as a reminder.
Trump is too much of a loose cannon to say how the winds will blow come Election Day. When he dials down the tweeting and lets Democrats take up the news cycle, the odds for his reelection look good. But if we get another year mimicking the past two weeks, Clinton may ultimately prove the only person on the planet capable of losing to Trump.
